How many hymns (or sermons, for that matter) have you heard about hell? Probably not many! Why is that? It may be that our church culture has grown accustomed to wanting only themes that are happy and pleasant … and positive. There are many who just don’t want to think about this, burying their head in the sands of blissful thinking. The only thing happy and pleasant about the Bible’s teaching concerning hell is that those of us who belong to Christ can be positive that we will never go there! Part of the reason for that scarcity of attention is almost certainly that in our time fewer and fewer people even believe that there will be a hell. They have become so indoctrinated with the lie of universalism that has invented a non-existent god of peoples’ own imagination, one who loves everyone and would never send anyone to hell, even if it did exist.
But what about heaven? We do have a number of good hymns about our eternal abode, but we don’t actually hear as many sermons about heaven as we should. After all, it’s not only where God sits enthroned right now, with Jesus at His right hand. It’s also where we who belong to Christ will spend eternity, not because of anything we have done for ourselves, but only because of what He has done for us. In the midst of so much sadness and trouble and disappointment in this life, shouldn’t we think more often about the incredibly glorious future that awaits us just beyond the grave, or at the imminent return of the Lord Jesus? What joy that could bring into our day if we started our thinking about that rather than the latest disaster broadcast in the morning news report!